The Age of Radiance (52 page)

Following the Department of Defense’s “enough is never enough” policy, the AEC mirrored labs and production facilities so that, if one was destroyed in a nuclear strike, another just like it would continue on the vital work of making more and better Bombs. Hanford was replicated at Aiken, South Carolina, as the Savannah River Plant; Los Alamos was twinned with Livermore; and Oak Ridge was built over again in Paducah, Kentucky. Creating this massive enterprise required more than 11 percent of America’s nickel, 34 percent of her stainless steel, 33 percent of her hydrofluoric acid, and by 1957, 6.7 percent of her electrical power. From its opening annual budget of $1.4 billion in 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission’s capital budget hit $9 billion in 1955, greater than those of General Motors, Alcoa, DuPont, Goodyear, and Bethlehem and US Steel combined. The AEC’s labs turned out atomic weapons for all occasions—gravity bombs, submarine-pen penetration bombs, atomic artillery shells, ship-to-ship and air-to-air rocket-propelled devices, antiaircraft weapons, cruise-missile warheads, antiballistic-missile nuclear explosives, and the Davy Crockett, fired from a recoilless rifle; by 1970, Lawrence Livermore had designed sixty different nuclear weapons on its own, including George Gamow’s New Mexico Jumping Bean, which had a fission engine to fly to Russia, where it would turn itself into a bomb and fall from the sky. For the next two decades, widow Molly Lawrence did everything she could to get her husband’s name removed so he wouldn’t go down in history as the father of a nuclear munitions factory. Her effort failed.

Bernard Brodie left State to become RAND’s first great nuclear strategist. When Ed Teller leaked news of the forthcoming Teller-Ulam test to a RAND
physicist, a group headed by Brodie calculated that a five-to-ten megaton warhead would annihilate every creature in fifty square miles, that fifty-five twenty-megaton thermonuclears could take out Russia’s fifty biggest cities and kill 35 million people. The carnage was so extravagant that any idea of strategy or targeting was removed; the Backyard bomb of Teller’s Los Alamos dreams—the one so huge and so lethal you didn’t need to take it and drop it on an enemy, you could just set it off in your own backyard—had come true. Brodie: “We no longer need to argue whether the conduct of war is an art or a science—it is neither. The art or science comes in only in finding out, if you’re interested, what not to hit.”

In 1954, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, announced that, as the Soviet army was so vast and could attack anywhere and anytime, America had a new defense policy: Massive Retaliation. If provoked, the United States would attack with everything it had, including the whole of its nuclear arsenal. Inspired by a 1947 fashion magazine, Eisenhower called this approach the New Look, though it was just another Sunday Punch. In the 1960s, Washington with NATO created Flexible Response, a strategy described in 1982 by Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger:
“Under this concept, the United States and NATO planned to strengthen general purpose warfare forces in order to better equip them to deal with a Soviet conventional attack; at the same time, US nuclear capabilities were increased in order to provide the President with the option of using nuclear forces both to support our general purpose forces and to respond selectively (on less than an all-out basis) to a limited Soviet nuclear attack. The option of retaliation on a more massive scale was retained in order to deter the possibility of a major Soviet nuclear attack. This concept of flexible response remains as a central principle of our strategy today.”

Even though the strategy required ever more and ever bigger weapons bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, Flexible Response’s amending of the all-out first attack of Sunday Punch and Massive Retaliation meant that Bernard Brodie’s key points were becoming mainstream defense policy. At the same time, his thoughtful stance was being wholly overturned by his successor at RAND, the neoconservative icon Albert Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter made a name for himself in 1951 by showing how the USSR could use a lightning strike to destroy 85 percent of SAC with 120 nuclear bombs—a presentation that terrified many in the air force, even though it was outlandishly implausible considering Soviet military capabilities at the time. Wohlstetter initiated the concept of “fail-safe,” ensuring the ability to guard against accidental Armageddon, counseled the air force and SAC to target military
installations instead of cities, and promoted the use of surveillance planes and satellites to monitor the enemy’s capabilities. LeMay was uninterested, so Wohlstetter had to present his notions directly to the air force’s chief of staff, giving over ninety-two briefings from 1952 to 1953, most of which became national defense policy.

On July 21, 1955, Eisenhower unveiled an arms control plan that became informally known as Open Skies, which would have allowed the US and the USSR to monitor each other’s military installations to make sure they were treaty-compliant. Khrushchev immediately rejected it as an “espionage plot,” which the Americans were expecting; the plan was primarily hatched as a global public relations maneuver portraying Washington as working in favor of arms control, with Moscow secretive and belligerent. But the reason for Khrushchev’s refusal was the worry that if the United States found out the truth about Soviet defenses, it would strike and invade. Nikita Khrushchev:
“Our missiles were still imperfect in performance and insignificant in number. . . . [So] we couldn’t allow the US and its allies to send their inspectors crisscrossing around the Soviet Union. They would have discovered that we were in a relatively weak position, and that realization might have encouraged them to attack us.” Twice, in June 1961 and August 1963, John Kennedy proposed that the Americans and the Russians fly to the moon together, and each time Khrushchev refused, citing espionage, but the reason was the same as for Open Skies; the premier worried that a joint program would reveal to the enemy his country’s profound weakness.

In 1956,
“the USSR had a total of 426 nuclear warheads,” rocket scientist (and son of the Soviet premier) Sergei Khrushchev explained. “That year the United States had an overall nuclear superiority 10.8 times greater. To restrain the West from a possible attack on the Soviet Union, Father decided to resort to bluff and intimidation. During his visit to England in April 1956, he casually inquired from time to time—once during an official lunch, once in the course of a five-hour tea at the fireplace of the prime minister’s country residence at Chequers—if his hosts knew how many nuclear warheads it would take to wipe their island off the face of the earth. An awkward silence followed. But Father did not drop the subject, and with a broad smile on his face he informed those present that if they didn’t know, he could help them, and he mentioned a specific number. Then he added, quite cheerfully, ‘And we have lots of those nuclear warheads, as well as the missiles to deliver them.’ It was in those years that he used the famous phrase ‘We are producing missiles like sausages.’ When I asked him how he could say that, since the Soviet Union had no more than half a dozen intercontinental missiles,
Father only laughed: ‘We’re not planning to start a war, so it doesn’t matter how many missiles are deployed. The main thing is that Americans think we have enough for a powerful strike in response. So they’ll be wary of attacking us.’ Such statements by Father were in fact received with enthusiasm on the other side of the ocean, since they made it easier for the American military to receive additional funds.”

The Russians were especially alarming adversaries to American political and military leaders as it seemed impossible to know what they would do next. On the one hand they seemed barbaric to Washington powers-that-be—“Asiatics,” as Truman sneered. On the other, they would trump American beliefs that the West had superior science and technology by having fission and fusion bombs long before the United States expected and would shock the world by launching a satellite orbiting the globe before the United States even had a rocket that could lift such a payload into orbit. On October 4, 1957, Americans were horrified to learn they now had a Red Moon orbiting over their heads, as
Sputnik
circumnavigated the globe 1,440 times for ninety days, before reentering the atmosphere and burning up. Here was direct physical evidence that the Soviets could deliver nuclear strikes anywhere in the world. In his memoirs, Khrushchev explained his reasoning for the space and missile race:
“Of course we tried to derive the maximum political advantage from the fact that we were first to launch our rockets into space. We wanted to exert pressure on the American militarists—and also influence the minds of more reasonable politicians—so that the United States would start treating us better.”

Instead, US military leaders now demanded a dramatic increase in spending for conventional and nuclear weapons, even more than the dramatic increase in spending for conventional and nuclear weapons that had already been budgeted. Three weeks after
Sputnik
’s launch, an October 29 CIA report held that the Soviets were well on their way to having a sophisticated missile program up and running and concluded that “the country is in a period of grave national emergency,” while the US Air Force across the early 1960s insisted that the USSR had dramatically eclipsed the USA in the strength of its missile forces. When the U-2 spy plane’s recon photos did not reveal either of these dramatic assertions, Curtis LeMay said that he knew the missiles were there, but that the American cameras had missed them. In fact the opposite was true: the Soviets then had four ICBMs, but moved them around on tracks to be photographed again and again by American surveillance to create an illusion of strength. When Kennedy then used this “missile gap” in his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, Khrushchev
believed Kennedy was warmongering and might wage a preemptive American strike. In 1961, his fears were confirmed by the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

The month after the launch of
Sputnik
, the November 7 Gaither Report prepared for Eisenhower insisted that the USSR would soon surpass the United States in nuclear power, that the Kremlin had already prepared its citizenry for nuclear combat, and urged the government to spend $25 billion on a nationwide system of fallout shelters and a massive campaign instructing Americans on what to do when the Bombs began to fall. A new agency, the Office of Civil Defense, would spend the next two decades promoting the fantasy that everyday Americans could survive nuclear war, creating a cartoon hero, Bert the turtle, who when attacked by monkeys wielding sticks of TNT knew to “duck and cover.” Bert then explained that, as a nuclear bomb explosion “would break windows all over town,” American schoolchildren should themselves duck and cover under furniture to survive the forthcoming holocaust. But at least this was a sincere effort; when Khrushchev told the West,
“It would take really very few multimegaton nuclear bombs to wipe out your small and densely populated countries and kill you instantly in your lairs,” Kennedy said there was only one answer: “A fallout shelter for everybody, as rapidly as possible.” Kennedy’s own fallout shelters were built on Nantucket, Massachusetts, near the family compound in Hyannis Port, and on Peanut Island, Florida, near the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach.

The OCD informed suburbanites—urban dwellers were excluded from the program as it was assumed cities would be targets, and the majority of their populations immediately slaughtered—that their backyard fallout shelters needed concrete walls at least a foot thick, additionally shielded by five hundred cubic feet of air and three and a half inches of packed dirt or a half inch of lead. Twinkies were a staple of shelter pantries since they were supposed to “stay fresh forever,” but supporting human life for the duration of thermonuclear aftereffects required far more sophisticated ventilation than these backyard designs, as well as some kind of waste disposal. Journalist Susan Roy:
“One thing that was rarely talked about was going to the bathroom. You were supposed to take a garbage bin and line it with plastic. Imagine. When it was full, you were supposed to close it, run outside really fast, and leave it.” Cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia provided their children with dog tags so they could be identified in case they were incinerated in a nuclear holocaust—New York City distributed 2.5 million tags between February and April of 1952—and the 1951
Journal of the National Education Association
had a discussion on whether kids should be tattooed with their identities. The experts concluded that, as skin could not survive nuclear war, tattooing was not effective.

Besides testing the effects of atomic bombs on various building materials and producing motion pictures so that American citizens could see paint being boiled away and edifices being thrown in one direction by the shock wave and then reversed by the pull of the rising mushroom cloud, the Federal Civil Defense Administration ran Operation Cue at the Nevada Test Site to determine the effects of nuclear attacks on the typical American family. Journalist Laura McEnaney:
“They called them mannequin families and they dressed them up in JC Penney clothing and they positioned them in various rooms of the house. And in one room there was a child taking a nap, in another room there was a family dinner party, and one of the things they did, they placed families hiding underneath shelters. And they equipped each of these homes with refrigerators, typical appliances one would find in a home, the kinds of food one would eat, from baby food to adult food, and they exposed them to blast. These were sort of like morality tales. Each film, each brochure, was a morality tale. If you didn’t prepare, you have only yourself to blame for being wounded or killed. And it asked American families to think about themselves not just as friends, neighborhoods, family members, but as warriors of a cold war. And this really introduced a military purpose and practice into American family life.”

Post-
Sputnik
, Eisenhower’s Open Skies would come true through another avenue with Corona, the CIA’s surveillance-satellite program, which began to replace the U-2s in 1959, and which, using high-resolution, remarkably detailed 70 mm Eastman Kodak film, provided Washington with information about every aspect of Soviet and Chinese military power. Yet, even though the United States now knew how much weaker the Soviets were than previously believed, it reassured no one. At any minute, after all, the Red Army might surpass the red, white, and blue’s forces and achieve nuclear dominance. This never happened, but the Soviets did begin their own successful spy-satellite program, and fairly quickly the superpowers reached eye-in-the-sky reconnaissance parity. But oddly enough, neither deployed antisatellite weapons against the other, perhaps realizing that knowledge made for less frightened and less trigger-happy foes. Leaving each other’s satellites alone, it turned out, was a more brilliant strategy than Killing a Nation, Sunday Punch, Massive Retaliation, and Flexible Response combined.